Bloomberg Businessweek’s rendition of the toll taken on the President dealing with the stress of the next four years. King Romney was the alternative cover:

…the road ahead for President Obama as he faces the fiscal cliff and crucial decisions for the future of the economy, business, and defense,” writes Businessweek. “The opposition remains considerable, and no matter how successful he is, the hardest job in the world will take its toll.

…and the fate of the human species (you wouldn’t expect Bloomberg Businessweek to mention this, would you?):

Train wrecks, even one that appears to be happening in slow motion, usually are ‘shocking’. Great speech by Chomsky, especially the climate change segment:

…maybe humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr. He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. He—and he had some pretty good evidence. There’s a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, that’s biological success. And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in human—in world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine. But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, it’s very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, there’s a lot of cows; it’s only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, it’s the same. ‘Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered. There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure. Anyhow, maybe we’re trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and we’re hell bent on it right now…

…organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

So is anything going to be done about it? The prospects are not very auspicious. As you know, there was an international conference on this last December. A total disaster. Nothing came out of it. The emerging economies, China, India, and others, argued that it’s unfair for them to bear the burden of a couple hundred years of environmental destruction by the currently rich and developed societies. That’s a credible argument. But it’s one of these cases where you can win the battle and lose the war. The argument isn’t going to be very helpful to them if, in fact, the environmental crisis advances and a viable society goes with it…

By all accounts, we appear to be racing toward our own expiration date.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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4 thoughts on “The Next Four Years: the Wear and Tear of Reality”

Great last line from the link: He said superstorm Sandy may spur more Americans, and people elsewhere, to consider the risks of climate change, but warned: “It’s a bit like being shocked into stopping smoking when you’ve been told you’ve got terminal cancer.”

I’d say something about how, by the time the new IPCC report is issued, it will be far too late even if there will be anyone around to read it but then, it has been far too late for a long time.

Yes I fear it is much too late, like half a century too late. The problem is the lag time of our environmental destruction. Everything appears OK to humans who have an attention span of a gnat in terms of generational changes and certainly in terms of geologic time. The damage from our ecological overshoot is irreversible and unfixable as far as a timetable that would allow humans to avoid extinction. And human nature won’t allow for a transition from the current economic paradigm that rules the globe. The situation is indeed terminal for us.

As nations scramble to feed their populations in the not too distant future, I wonder if the end of the human race will be punctuated with the nuclear explosions of a WW III.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate.

The temperature of the earth’s surface depends largely on two minor constituents of the atmosphere: water vapor and carbon dioxide. They are transparent to the short-wave energy (light and near infrared) that comes from the sun, but opaque to most of the long-wave heat radiation that tries to return to space. This “greenhouse effect” traps heat and makes the earth’s surface considerably warmer than it would be if the atmosphere had no water vapor or carbon dioxide in it. An increase in either constituent would make it warmer still. Warm eras in the geological past may have been caused by CO2 from volcanoes.

At present the atmosphere contains 2.35 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, existing in equilibrium with living plants and sea water (which tends to dissolve it). Up to 1860, man’s fires added only about 500 million tons per year, and the atmosphere had no trouble in getting rid of this small amount. But each year more furnaces and engines poured CO2 into the atmosphere. In 1900, the amount was 3 billion tons. By 1950, it was 9 billion tons. By 2010, if present trends continue, 47 billion tons of carbon dioxide will enter the air each year. [actual @37 billion tons]

This will be only 2% of the total carbon dioxide, but if it is more than can be dissolved by the oceans or absorbed by plants or minerals, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will tend to increase. The greenhouse effect will be intensified. Some scientists believe that this is the cause of recent warming of the earth’s climate. Dr. Revelle has his doubts.

In the future, if the blanket of CO2 produces a temperature rise of only one or two degrees, a chain of secondary effects may come into play. As the air gets warmer, sea water will get warmer too, and CO2 dissolved in it will return to the atmosphere. More water will evaporate from the warm ocean, and this will increase the greenhouse effect of the CO2. Each effect will reinforce the other, possibly raising the temperature enough to melt the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland, which would flood the earth’s coastal lands.

Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.

…Tidwell received a notice from his own insurance, Travelers Insurance. They said rates for coverage near the coast must go up, due to higher risks associated with climate change. Travelers included a brochure showing the typical American house, with a tornado and dark storm clouds all around. They cited information from the re-insurance giant Swiss Re, about climate change.

Mike notes that this message did not come from Obama or Al Gore. It comes from businesses that are neither Republican nor Democrats, but firms with their own money at risk.

However, the insurance companies are caught in a difficult bind. They don’t say too much against the fossil fuel companies as the cause of this developing destruction. That is because insurance corporations make money not on your premium, but on investing that premium in the stock market, among other places. Where can you make good money on stocks? By investing in oil, gas, and coal companies. So the insurance industry ends up investing in the very businesses that could put them out of business…

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